Weblog: A Family Affair: An Interview with Cheryl Boyce Taylor

(Note: This interview originally appeared in Lambda Book Report, Spring 2003, two years before her current work, Convincing the Body, was released.)

Writers who immigrate to other countries often spend time thinking and rethinking about how the worlds they live and dream in conflict or complete one another. Some of them are fortunate; they honor home by remembering, and recognize their contemporary life through acknowledgment. Trinidad-born and Queens-bred Cheryl Boyce Taylor is such a writer. A strong presence on the poetry circuit in New York City since the early Eighties, she is the author of two books of poetry, Raw Air (1997), and Night When Moon Follows (2002). In addition her work has appeared in several anthologies, and she is a well-regarded performer. Boyce Taylor, fifty-two years young, possesses a voice that lays bare the simple yet complex realities of being a Caribbean mother and lesbian who writes to inform, comfort, understand and be understood. What becomes clear in my conversations with Boyce Taylor is her love of story. She delights in language, much like her mother-now a seventy-seven-year-old award-winning storyteller who, still to this day, is called upon to spin yarns. Boyce recalls, “[She] told me stories at bedtime. I think that’s where it may have started for me.”

Boyce Taylor began honing her craft at the age of eight by writing letters to teachers, family and imaginary friends. “Our teachers always encouraged students to have adventures during school break, and to write stories about them. I loved that! So I always did, but my brother,” she says with a laugh, “well, he didn’t. Reading and writing was something that really held my attention back then. I clearly remember doing it during summer vacation when life seemed a little dull and dreary.”

School also helped Boyce Taylor shape the language she utilizes in her writing. Bored by the work of British writers whose words she describes as “stiff, archaic and rigid,” Boyce Taylor was enraptured by the language of her people. “Calypso… offered a less rigid, freer style of writing. I wanted to find a way to capture the speaking voice of my family. Calypso offered room for cursing, gossip, sex talk, lawless, unruly language. I loved it.” Boyce Taylor’s compassionate voice is also politically charged. “I write in Trini dialect or patois, to present my people just as they appear in their everyday life, and dialect allows that to happen,” she says. “Now we know how Trini people sound when ‘dey’ mad, when ‘dey’ intimate in ‘dey’ bedroom, when happy/sad. I use Trinidadian dialect in honor of my grandparents who died before I was born. Most of what I know about them is made up, but one thing is for sure: I know how they sounded when they spoke.”

When Boyce Taylor immigrated, alone, to New York in the early 1960s (her mother followed nearly a year later) the seeds of her preoccupations with identity, language and water started taking root. “I was devastated. I didn’t know that I would miss my mother that much,” she says. “I also missed little things that I took for granted, like making ice cream on Sunday, roasting cashew nuts, the dialect, calypso - all of it became so important to me. I knew something was in it that I needed, so I held on for dear life. It was all that I knew.”

Years later writing also came to rescue a twenty-two-year-old mother of one. “[Motherhood] wasn’t what I thought it would be,” she says with a smile. “A little too much work for me!” Again she picked up the pen, and soon after Boyce Taylor began traveling where she found herself immersed, literally, in one of her life-long preoccupations: water. “I didn’t know why I needed to travel to the Caribbean twice a year and get in the water; I just did. My body would be tired, and it called for being submerged in salt water. After that I could go for another nine months.” Water is a reoccurring motif in Boyce Taylor’s work, notably in the multimedia piece “Moon Over River Talking Back,” in which a river complains about being poisoned by humanity, and in her text “Water,” which was commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow with funding by the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown, founder and artistic director of Evidence, a contemporary dance company. Brown was drawn to the richness of Boyce Taylor’s voice, and was determined to work with her. “I began dreaming about water and even when I was awake, water was all over my life. I called Cheryl, and she sent me over ten pages of text within twenty-four hours,” says Brown. Boyce Taylor would recite the text as Brown improvised. “It was a special way to work, and I learn a lot each time we come together,” he says. Currently the two artists are in the research stage of another collaboration, “Redemption.”

Boyce Taylor’s contemporaries tend to use similar adjectives when describing her. “Exuberant, curious, sometimes silly, and truly generous,” says Donna Lee Weber, writer and longtime friend. “I would describe her as vivacious, alert, at times maternal, full of life, persistent and commandeering,” says Pamela Sneed, fellow writer and author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom, Than Slavery, and of the forthcoming collection of memoirs, essays and stories, “20 Minutes Was Forever.”

Indeed for the past three decades Boyce Taylor’s work has made a mark, in New York and nationally. Besides tirelessly performing her work at bookstores, colleges, libraries and other venues, in 1994 she represented New York at the National Poetry Slam, and toured as a road poet with the Lollapalooza Music Festival. Most recently she was named poet-in-residence at the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center at the Brooklyn Public Library. “I hope to infuse the teens and adults that I will be working with with the joy, wonder, excitement and adventure of poetry,” she says. “The primary goal of the residency is to reach as wide an audience of teens as possible to expose them to writing and reading poetry, and to produce a publication. Poets House, who partnered with Brooklyn Public, will be watching this program closely as a model to duplicate nationwide.”

As for being a lesbian in this position, Boyce Taylor is clear about her primary focus. “Truthfully, being a lesbian has not come up yet. Unfortunately Caribbean folks are still very homophobic,” she says. “I am not closeted (Cee, her lover of four years, inspired the love poems in Night When Moon Follows), but for me being a Caribbean woman poet is the proudest mande that I can wear. I do not wear my rainbow flag to work, but I won’t ever shy away, or be untruthful whenever the topic or discussion conies up. I am a proud lesbian, but it is not my first identity. Poet is.”

And for Boyce Taylor, storytelling is a family affair. In celebration of Mother’s Day she will be performing a reading with her son, Phife, who is a member of the hip hop trio, A Tribe Called Quest. Consider that in the fourteen years while she was raising her son Boyce Taylor concurrently built a successful career as a respected writer, and managed to earn a bachelor’s from York College in theater, another from Long Island University in education and a master’s degree from Fordham University in social work. And she shows no signs of slowing down. In the months ahead Boyce Taylor is keeping busy with other projects, including finishing a manuscript of poetry called “Where There Are Bones.”

Although her projects are numerous, Boyce Taylor’s mission remains steadfast. “As a Trinidadian living in America, I live in a world of duality. It is incumbent upon me to represent both, with equal amounts of fairness and justice. Trinidadian dialect for me makes a political statement,” she says. “It represents the African griot, or oral tradition. It also represents a departure from the language of the colonizer. My job here is to capture all that has been lost through our first passage, and dirough migration. That is the ultimate work of my poetry.”